Scrap (2006)

tosh · Hacker News: Best · twitter.com · 7 min

After discovering that Pittsburgh's scrappers will haul away a cast-iron bathtub overnight, a newcomer later helps two aging metal scavengers named Ron and Wade extract a broken furnace from a basement. The process involves a claustrophobic freakout, an axe, and a going rate of four cents a pound.

Hacker News: 371 points · 197 commentsComments

Concurrent Servers: Part 8 - Go

Eli Bendersky · Eli Bendersky's website · eli.thegreenplace.net · 8 min

Four implementations of a simple protocol server demonstrate the concurrency patterns: sequential, one goroutine per client, semaphore-limited, and worker-pool. It argues that async/event-driven programming is almost never necessary, since goroutines are cheap and the runtime hides an epoll-based event loop; 2018 measurements put switching at ~170 ns versus 1–2 microseconds for Linux threads.

Sixty Frames for the Record: A Three.js Game, Seven Fly-Throughs, and a Wall of CRTs

Filip Zrnzevic · Codrops · tympanus.net · 14 min

A musician and web developer tours his Three.js lab, where a Space Invaders game, seven fly-through worlds, and a wall of failing CRTs are built to house his music. He shares hard-won engineering lessons: budget pixels not DPR, judge p95 not median, toggle light intensity not visibility, and batch merges erase per-object flags—backed by specifics like a 2 ms frame on M1 Max and a shader compile fix that cut programs from 140 to 98.

As Flock battles public scrutiny, other police surveillance companies see an opening

Jaclyn Diaz · News : NPR · npr.org · 6 min

Cities such as Denver and Longmont are signing with Axon after dropping Flock amid backlash, a trend Axon’s CEO confirms. Yet privacy advocates warn the switch only replaces one surveillance network with another, leaving the same data-sharing dangers intact.

I run a Microsoft 365 killer suite off my laptop, and it's good enough to replace my cloud subscriptions

XDA · tyler's Top Finds on Scour Today · xda-developers.com · 6 min

Turning a 2017 Acer gaming laptop into a Proxmox node, this piece details a self-hosted productivity stack—Nextcloud with Collabora Office, Blinko, Open Notebook—plus llama.cpp on the GTX 1060 for local RAG. It also covers a Home Assistant smart-plug automation that cuts power between 30% and 80% battery to avoid swelling.

Specially Crafted NTFS File-System Image Allows Root Access On Linux With NTFS3 Driver

Michael Larabel · Phoronix · phoronix.com · 2 min

A malicious NTFS image on a USB drive makes the NTFS3 driver create a setuid-root binary on mount, letting any local user gain root privileges. The unpatched flaw, reported two months ago, is trivial to exploit because desktop automounters mount NTFS with suid; discoverer Vova Tokarev provides a PoC and one-line fix.

Hacker News: 2 points · 0 comments

Putting mice into hibernation causes a major loss of synapses

Jacek Krywko · Ars Technica · arstechnica.com · 7 min

Inducing a hibernation-like state in mice wipes out more than half of their hippocampal synapses, yet the animals' memories remain intact. Memory survives because engram synapses clustered tightly on dendrites are spared—many on rare multisynaptic boutons—while a control treatment that strips a similar share of synapses does impair recall. The findings hint that the brain may rebuild toward a default configuration, with unpublished results showing suppressed epilepsy.

Hacker News: 3 points · 1 commentsComments

Lights Out in Scoresby Sund: Capturing a Total Eclipse in the High Arctic

Ruth Taylor · PetaPixel · petapixel.com · 11 min

Two photographers lead a workshop to Greenland's Scoresby Sund to shoot a total solar eclipse from a ship, wrestling with weight limits, cloud cover, and a captain holding position against a 16-knot crosswind. Their unconventional landscape shots include a drone image that accidentally captures the moon's shadow line across the water.

The End of Friday Nights with Friends

Tyler Cowen · Marginal Revolution · marginalrevolution.com · 2 min

Using American Time Use Survey data from 2003 to 2024 (N = 243,095), Neal Caren maps the hourly rhythm of friend time and finds the weekly cycle has collapsed: Friday night now resembles a typical weeknight. Overall time with friends has fallen by more than half, with no compensating rise in other social activities — the 'night out' has simply disappeared.

Comments

A Kantian Critique of "Sorry" by Justin Bieber

altmanaltman · Hacker News: Best · decodingvibes.com · 5 min

Reading Justin Bieber's 'Sorry' through Kant's categorical imperative, the piece argues the song's central question—Is it too late?—contains its own answer: an apology evaluated by what it can secure is a hypothetical imperative, not a moral duty. It follows the lyrics as the focus shifts from the wrong committed to the wrongdoer's loss, concluding the apology is ultimately self-interested.

Hacker News: 214 points · 91 commentsComments

The More Loving One: The Science of Entropy and the Art of Alternative Endings

Maria Popova · Brain Pickings · themarginalian.org · 7 min

In 1865, Rudolf Clausius coined 'entropy' to name the universe's irreversible undoing; W.H. Auden internalized it to revise his love poem from 'We must love one another or die' to 'and die.' It pairs that one-word shift with Auden's devotion to Chester Kallman — a love that survived romantic entropy into lifelong friendship.

Using AI Slop to Sell Cameras Will Never Make Sense to Me

Jaron Schneider · PetaPixel · petapixel.com · 4 min

A camera writer takes aim at two companies for using generative AI in marketing: Xtra's AI-generated animal video for its Muse gimbal, and Ricoh GR Europe's night-photography post that four detectors flagged as likely AI with 95% confidence. The complaint: why sell a creative tool with fake visuals when you have real footage?

BSO musicians vote to authorize first potential strike in orchestra history

GBH News · wgbh.org · 2 min

Boston Symphony Orchestra musicians have voted to authorize a work stoppage that would be unprecedented for the ensemble, with their contract expiring Sunday night. The vote does not guarantee a strike, but negotiations remain tense amid the pending departure of music director Andris Nelsons, which musicians say has complicated talks.

Trial of former Suffolk County sheriff charged with extortion slated to start Monday

GBH News · wgbh.org · 3 min

Federal prosecutors allege that Steven Tompkins, the former Suffolk County sheriff, used the threat of ending a re-entry job partnership to secure a $50,000 pre-IPO investment in Ascend Wellness Holdings, then demanded a refund when the stock fell. The defense counters that the transactions were above-board friendliness, not a quid pro quo, and the trial begins Monday.

SWG lead's new MMO, Stars Reach, almost lost me—until I met an animal conservationist mayor

harvey.randall@futurenet.com (Harvey Randall) · PC Gamer · pcgamer.com · 6 min

Stars Reach's early access is rough: janky mechanics, WIP skill trees, and dull missions nearly drive the writer away. Then he finds the Galactic Union of Natural Conservation, a player group with an elected mayor and xenobiologists, working to conserve creatures on a shared planet. He argues the game's real appeal lies in such emergent communities—but the game hides them behind Discord hunts and mission boards.

This mod transforms Doom into a terrifying tactical shooter, and it's partly inspired by another PC gaming classic

PC Gamer · pcgamer.com · 3 min

Blackout, a Doom source-port mod by PKmX, turns Doom's fast combat into slow, methodical tactical clearing with fragile movement, realistic firearms, and suppression mechanics. Enemy behavior is tweaked, and a stealth system lets quiet players sneak past. The mod's nanosuit-style energy shield, adrenaline boost, and cloaking device draw inspiration from Crysis, not Stalker as the footage suggests.

Diamonds for sale: lab-grown gem auctions are all over TikTok right now, but some aren’t happy about it

Rosalind Adams · Technology | The Guardian · theguardian.com · 6 min

TikTok live auctions are selling lab-grown diamonds for as little as $100–$200 per carat, drawing crowds of spectators and bargain hunters. Buyers like Andrea Greenhill, who has purchased over 30 stones since June, describe the rush of scoring a gem in seconds. But jewelers warn that fast-paced auctions and video lighting can hide poor cuts, and loose stones still need costly settings.

New Fat Bear Week children’s book turns Katmai’s famous bears into wrestlers

Laura Baisas · Popular Science · popsci.com · 5 min

An interview with Alaskan author Brooke Hartman about her new picture book Big Fat Bear Battle!, which casts Katmai’s salmon-gorging brown bears as wrestling superstars. Hartman describes two decades of summers at Brooks Falls, the absurd abundance of fish, and her struggle to balance whimsy with bear facts. The book hits shelves August 25.

Christophe Pettus: All Your GUCs in a Row: lo_compat_privileges

Planet PostgreSQL · postgr.es · 3 min

PostgreSQL's lo_compat_privileges flag silently restores 8.4-era large-object security, skipping ownership and ACL checks so any connecting role can read, write, or delete large objects. Pettus maps exactly which checks it bypasses, why migrations and vacuumlo tempt people to enable it, and the cheap GRANT/ALTER OWNER fixes that make it unnecessary.